Kenyan writer and author of Half Portraits Under Water, Dennis Mugaa, believes that President William Ruto’s administration is authoritarian: ‘Young people genuinely want a better country, but we are living in a country that has been slowly sliding into authoritarianism over the past two years, since President Ruto’s government took over. Beyond that, his leadership has been very poor.’
First Draft is our interview column, featuring authors and other prominent figures on books, reading, and writing.
Our questions are italicized.
What books or kinds of books did you read growing up?
Growing up, I derived great pleasure from reading, therefore, I read anything I could get my hands on. I read abridged classics; I found so many of them interesting and worldly. I distinctly remember reading The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas. In school, I read Arabian Nights and The Adventures of TinTin series by Herge, and I was amazed by how colourful these books were. Of course, back then, I never read Adventures of TinTin with a critical eye to notice its racist undertones; I simply enjoyed the stories and the adventures. I read a lot of Swahili children’s and young adult literature books. I also read The Famous Five books by Enid Blyton, the Supa Strikas comic book series, the Pacesetter series, Barbara Kimenye’s Moses series, and the Bible. I liked reading Bible stories so much that when I was ten years old, I read the Bible from cover to cover. Even though I would go on to lose my faith later in life, I always felt that Bible stories were very enriching. One book trilogy that was integral to me at the time was His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman.
It is important to mention when we got the Encyclopaedia at home, because of how it opened the expanse of time and history to me. I must have been around eleven, and I spent days reading the Encyclopaedia. I knew so much about the Greek and Roman pantheons and ancient civilizations in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Americas.
What’s the last thing you read and disagreed with?
I recently read somewhere, although I cannot remember where, that Kenyan president, William Ruto, is a political genius for navigating through the protests of June and July. But police brutality, abductions and the murders of young protesters can hardly be considered genius. We have a problem where we think of politics as a ‘Game of Thrones’, instead of thinking about people’s lives. I think if we see every single decision we make as political, then we can begin to hold our leaders to account and shift our thinking in such a way that we stop seeing our leaders as all-powerful.
Police brutality, abductions and the murders of young protesters can hardly be considered genius. We have a problem where we think of politics as a ‘Game of Thrones’, instead of thinking about people’s lives.
What was your process for writing your debut collection, Half Portraits Under Water?
I cannot say I had a particular process for writing the collection. Initially, I was only writing short stories. It was not until 2022, when I was doing an MA in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, that I began to conceive of it as a book which could stand on its own. It then became a matter of selecting which stories worked and which did not. In total, it took me five years—between April 2018 and January 2023—to write the collection. By the time I fully saw how the book could work, I had already written eight stories. Therefore, it was a matter of adding two more stories to make the collection whole.
Half Portraits Under Water is a collection of ten loosely interlinked stories that explore love, loss, and the interconnected nature of human experiences. What inspired this collection of short stories?
Ever since I read Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, I had always had this idea of writing something that was interconnected in some way. This was why, when I conceived the stories, I was writing as a book, I selected stories that directly fed into each other. What amazed me was how smoothly some characters in some stories fit into another story. It felt like I was arranging a jigsaw puzzle.
And what was the most challenging story to write?
The most challenging story to write was ‘The Only One I Have Not Lost’. It is about a Somali exile called Ifrah, although in the story, her name is never mentioned. She is referred to as Mama Yusuf. She is about 55 years old in 2017 when the story takes place, and she came to Kenya during the fall of Siad Barre in 1991. It took me about a year to find the right voice for the story because of how different this person was from me. I had not even considered telling the story from her point of view. I had to research the story deeply by reading up on the experiences of Somali refugees who came into Kenya during that period. The breakthrough came for me when I understood that exile feels as if one is living two lives: the life they are living presently in that country and the life they have left in their former countries, which they cannot go back to. Edward Saïd writes about this in Reflections on Exile, stating, ‘For an exile, habits of life, expression or activity in the new environment inevitably occur against the memory of these things in another environment.’
What’s one thing about the reactions to the book that surprised you?
So far, the book has been out in Nigeria for only about two months, and in Kenya for only a month. I have not had a surprising reaction to the book just yet.
You’ve written about Gaël Faye’s Small Country and Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men for The Republic. How has engaging with these poignant works influenced your writing or shaped your perspective on African storytelling?
When I read Gaël Faye’s book, Small Country, one thing I really liked was that it is a coming-of-age story set in Burundi during the civil war and during the genocide against the Tutsi people in Rwanda. I think Small Country is a flawed book; that is, a reader can tell that there are some things that could have been done better. But if it were written better, something of its honesty would be lost. It led me to read more about Rwanda’s long history—from its kingdoms to the present day—and I feel that has made me more aware of so much that I did not know before.
I was compelled to write about The Most Secret Memory of Men. I believe everyone should read it. These two works are translated from the French. There is a lot of literature written by Africans in which translation has helped bridge the distance. Because I am aware of how dominant literature first written in English is, I always try to read outside this boundary. Here, I will mention Jose Eduardo Agualusa’s A General Theory of Oblivion, translated from Portuguese and Little Mother by Cristina Ali Farah, translated from Italian. These are two fine books by African authors.
I think Gaël Faye’s Small Country is a flawed book; that is, a reader can tell that there are some things that could have been done better. But if it were written better, something of its honesty would be lost.
What’s the first book you read that made you think you wanted to be a writer?
I clearly remember wanting to write a book like Where Rainbows End by Cecelia Ahern when I first read it. It was a book in my mother’s collection of books that was written in epistolary format, and I remember just how inventive it was. This was when I was around eight or nine. But I didn’t quite grasp the true idea of who a writer was. Therefore, I will have to mention a second realization: when I was in university, I came upon Collected Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges and it became clear to me that I wanted to do what Borges did.
You are a Rajat Neogy Editorial fellow at the African literary magazine, A Long House. What makes a great story?
As an editor, I have been very attracted to creative non-fiction and essays. I am not sure why, but I have a feeling it is because, with these formats, I get to have a conversation with the writer about what they want to do and suggest ways for them to get there. We work and work on it to give it shape. We also do the technical work, from sentence arrangement to paragraph arrangement, and even conceptualization. If it is a commissioned essay, I am able to describe what I would like the essay to do. With creative non-fiction and essays, it is also easy for me to curate topics and present ideas for discussion. How wonderful it is when I find a writer who is also a deep thinker! There is nothing quite like that. It is this feeling of building a piece that attracts me so much. If the piece sufficiently answers the questions it raises, I know it is a good story.
For fiction, I am not sure I know what makes a great story anymore. I have read so many good short stories, written in such different ways, about such different topics, that the only thing I’m left with is a vague answer: it depends on how the story makes you feel once you have read it. It is easy to tell what a good story is apart from what isn’t. Even a good story that one has not enjoyed reading is easy to see.
Who is the most compelling character you’ve ever encountered in a book, and what makes them memorable?
Without a doubt, the answer is Kazija. She is a character in Said A. Mohamed’s Utengano, a Swahili book we were required to read in high school. The first sentences of the book are as follows: ‘Kuna mengi ambayo Kazija anachukia. Ndiyo anachukia. . . Kwanza, anamchukia mwanamme. Anamchukia mwanamme kwa sababu dhahiri, nayo ni kuwa amewekwa mbele, ingawa Kazija hajui na nani. Daima atamchukia mwanamme kwa sababu hiyo.’ Loosely translated into English, it means: ‘There are many things that Kazija hates. Yes, hates. . . The first is that she hates men. She hates men because they have always been put first, even though Kazija does not know by whom. She will always hate men because of that.’
In the opening scene, Kazija has hatched a plan to ensure that a young man, Musa, and his father, Bwana Maksuudi, meet at her place, in order to enact her revenge on Bwana Maksuudi. This is because Bwana Maksuudi married Kazija’s friend’s daughter and then divorced her, leading to the girl’s death. She is seeing both men, but the two men are unaware of this. Musa arrives at her house first, and when Bwana Maksuudi arrives, she hides Musa under her bed. However, Bwana Maksuudi eventually finds Musa, and this leads to the downfall of his family. I am oversimplifying the subsequent plot, as it has been years since I read that book, but I always remember Kazija seething with anger, determined to revenge her friend’s daughter. And those first lines, how seething they were! Kazija is not a main character, but in the few instances we get to read of her, we glimpse her entire personality fully. I have never forgotten Kazija.
Which contemporary books do you think will become classics in the future?
The first and most obvious book is Mohamed Mbougar Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men. When I first read it, I thought it was a masterpiece. I felt a rush of electricity with each page that I read, and when I completed it, I had to reread it, because so rarely do I come across a perfect book. It is the sort of book that can ruin a reader, because it possesses you to read it over and over. And after you have read it multiple times, you emerge from its world wondering if any other book will ever be as good.
Safia Elhillo’s poetry book The January Children is also wonderful. The poems are magical, and they leave you with the feeling that you have experienced the entire world in just a few pages.
Finally, I’d say A Stranger’s Pose, Emmanuel Iduma’s book on his travels. There is a way the sentences move across that book so that it feels like a well-arranged song, a song that one could listen to over and over again.
When I first read The Most Secret Memory of Men, I thought it was a masterpiece. I felt a rush of electricity with each page that I read, and when I completed it, I had to reread it, because so rarely do I come across a perfect book.
Which three books from/on Kenya should everyone be reading at this moment?
I think everyone should read Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins. It is about the concentration camps that the British set up in Kenya in the 1950s, when freedom fighters were fighting against colonization. The British went to such great lengths to delete from history the crimes that they committed during this period, and for a long time those stories only remained with the victims. They had not been recognized as crimes as they should have been. The second book is, of course, Binyavanga Wainaina’s One Day I’ll Write About This Place. I like it because it is such a simple book to read. Lastly, a contemporary book I enjoyed reading last year was Troy Onyango’s collection of stories For What Are Butterflies Without Their Wings.
And what’s one thing readers should be aware of when reading about Kenya?
There is such hope amongst the young people of Kenya. Hope for a better country. This was seen during the protests that led to the occupation of parliament this year. Young people genuinely want a better country, but we are living in a country that has been slowly sliding into authoritarianism over the past two years, since President William Ruto’s government took over. Beyond that, his leadership has been very poor.
I think everyone should read Britain’s Gulag by Caroline Elkins. It is about the concentration camps that the British set up in Kenya in the 1950s, when freedom fighters were fighting against colonization.
What are you currently working on?
I am currently working on a novel titled Past Life, which I should really finish, as I want to work on another novel about writing. In addition, I have had this burning desire to build a creative non-fiction and essays platform modelled after Rajat Neogy’s Transition of the 60s and Les Temps Modernes founded by Jean-Paul Satre, Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. So, I have been writing up plans and ideas for that, and speaking about it, because I have reached a point where, if I don’t do it, my life will stop making sense. I envision it as more of an arts and culture institution, and this is the place I hope to end up at should everything fall into place.
Question from Chimezie Chika: What do you want your work to represent in the world?
I am not sure I would like my work to represent anything in the world, per se. I have always had this feeling that once I have written something, the story then belongs to the reader, and they read the work based on who they are as opposed to how I intended it. I can only hope to write the work as honestly as I can. What I can do, what I must do, is try as much as I can to follow what Chinua Achebe said about the role of the writer, about how art should be linked to the people it is from and should show them as they are. Additionally, I hope that my work will never side with the oppressor.
Bonus: Please suggest a question for a future author’s First Draft
What story or novel do you wish you had written differently?
Who should we interview next?
Rodney Muhumuza, the founder, and editor of The Weganda Review⎈
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